21st Feb 2018 – Data Science News Daily Roundup

JupyterLab now user-ready, JetBrains announces beta version of Datalore, Baidu’s latest research paper on Speech Synthesis, and more in today’s top stories around machine learning, deep learning,and data science news.

1. JupyterLab is now ready for users

Jupyter team announced the beta release of JupyterLab, the next-generation web-based interface for Project Jupyter. JupyterLab consists of an interactive development environment for working with notebooks, code and data.

JupyterLab provides a high level of integration between notebooks, documents, and activities:

Drag-and-drop to reorder notebook cells and copy them between notebooks.
Run code blocks interactively from text files (.py, .R, .md, .tex, etc.).
Link a code console to a notebook kernel to explore code interactively without cluttering up the notebook with temporary scratch work.
Edit popular file formats with live preview, such as Markdown, JSON, CSV, Vega, VegaLite, and more.

2. JetBrains announces beta version of Datalore: A web application for machine learning

Jet Brains has launched a public beta of Datalore, an intelligent web application for data analysis and visualization in Python.

Datalore includes features such as:

Intelligent and easy-to-use code editor
Incremental computations
Out-of-the-box machine learning tools
Real-time collaboration
Different computational instances

To read about the features in detail visit JetBrains’ official blog.

3. Baidu’s latest breakthrough in Speech Synthesis

Baidu Research recently rolled out a new research paper on “Neural Voice Cloning with a Few Samples”

This paper focuses on two fundamental approaches for solving the problems with voice cloning. Firstly, speaker adaptation and secondly, speaker encoding . Both these techniques can be adapted to a multi-speaker generative speech model with speaker embeddings, without degrading its quality. In terms of naturalness of the speech and similarity to the original speaker, both demonstrate good performance, even with very few cloning audios.

Read the research paper, for a complete information on this topic.

4. IBM and Unity collaboration brings Watson into virtual reality environments

IBM announced its collaboration with Unity to build a development kit for IBM platform. This platform will let companies to draw on IBM’s cloud-based Watson artificial intelligence suite into their projects.

The features that this collaboration would bring in are:

Ability to analyze the objects in a virtual environment using Watson Visual Recognition
The development kit would allow Unity developers to configure games and projects in order to understand speech, communicate with users, and understand the intent of a user in natural language.
Watson's Vision API will also allow developers to integrate real-time visual recognition into their Unity projects.

Visit Unity’s official blog post for a details on the extended features of this collaboration.

5. Satoshipowered.ai wants to link VR and blockchain

Satoshipowered.ai (SAI), a decentralized Autonomous Game Development and Crowd publishing Organization, stated that it wants to use blockchain’s decentralized bookkeeping to give players true ownership over digital goods, which could introduce economic scarcity to games with a focus on virtual worlds.

Satoshipowered.ai (SAI) announced that it will make use of the Ethereum blockchain, a cryptocurrency that allows anyone to spin up their own customized digital coin. Developers can rework the blockchain that keeps track of Ethereum to also keep track of any other records.

To know more about this in detail, read more here.